“Residence at C___”: Veronica Forrest- Thomson and Lisa Robertson Writing Cambridge

bagas widyanto;

This essay explores the much neglected late modernist poetry of Veronica Forrest- Thomson and reads it alongside Lisa Robertson’s book-length poem The Weather (2001), examining its connection to the city of Cambridge. Locating these works in the context of women writing what is commonly called Cambridge poetry, it investigates
how this, as well as the surrounding features of the town, are incorporated into the poems and whether they are, as Lisa Robertson suggests, “site-specific.” Through their formal and conceptual innovations, much informed by their institutional and
architectural surroundings, texts such as these create new conceptual spaces out of old traditions through formal innovation that is conceptualized as intellectual or emotional
“architecture.”